Federations

observers, beamed across space as pure genetic data, destined to be born in artificial wombs in hollowed out comet-cores, raised and educated by wasps, imprinted with the best tactical and strategic knowledge available. Thereafter they taught the wasps. From then on things heated up, because the observers weren’t limited by years of timelag. They were able to intervene in wasp evolution in realtime.

That ought to have been it, because by then we were pretty up-to-date, give or take four hundred years of the same.

But the frescos carried on.

There was one representing some future state of the Swirl, neatly ordered into a ticking orrery of variously sized and patterned worlds, some with beautiful rings or moon systems. And finally—like medieval conceptions of Eden—there was a triptych of lush planetary landscapes, with weird animals in the foreground, mountains and soaring cloudbanks behind.

“Seen enough to convince you?” Wendigo asked.

“No,” I said, not entirely sure whether I believed myself. Craning my neck, I looked up toward the apex.

Something hung from it.

It was a pair of wasps, fused together. One was complete, the other was only fully formed, seemingly in the process of splitting from the complete wasp. The fused pair looked to have been smothered in molten bronze, left to dry in waxy nodules.

“You know what this is?” Wendigo asked.

“I’m waiting.”

“Wasp art.”

I looked at her.

“This wasp was destroyed mid-replication,” Wendigo continued. “While it was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I’d put it in human terms I don’t know . . . ”

“Don’t even think about it.”

I followed her across the marbled terrazzo that floored the chamber. Arched porticos surrounded it, each of which held a single dead wasp, their body designs covering a hundred generations of evolution. If Wendigo was right, I supposed these dead wasps were the equivalent of venerated old ancestors peering from oil paintings. But I wasn’t convinced just yet.

“You knew this place existed?”

She nodded. “Or else we’d be dead. The wasps back in the Royalist stronghold told us we could seek sanctuary here, if home turned against us.”

“And the wasps—what? Own this place?”

“And hundreds like it, although the others are already far beyond the Swirl, on their way out to the halo. Since the wasps came to consciousness, most of the splinters flung out of the Swirl have been infiltrated. Shrewd of them—all along, we’ve never suspected that the splinters are anything other than cosmic trash.”

“Nice decor, anyway.”

“Florentine,” Wendigo said, nodding. “The frescos are in the style of a painter called Masaccio; one of Brunelleschi’s disciples. Remember, the wasps had access to all the cultural data we brought with us from GE— every byte of it. That’s how they work, I think—by constructing things according to arbitrary existing templates.”

“And there’s a point to all this?”

“I’ve been here precisely one day longer than you, Spirey.”

“But you said you had friends here, people who could help Yarrow.”

“They’re here all right,” Wendigo said, shaking her head. “Just hope you’re ready for them.”

On some unspoken cue they emerged, spilling from a door which until then I’d mistaken for one of the surrounding porticos. I flinched, acting on years of training. Although wasps have never intentionally harmed a human being—even the enemy’s wasps—they’re nonetheless powerful, dangerous machines. There were twelve of them, divided equally between Standardist and Royalist units. Six-legged, their two-meter-long, segmented alloy bodies sprouted weapons, sensors, and specialized manipulators. So far so familiar, except that the way the wasps moved was subtly wrong. It was as if the machines choreographed themselves, their bodies defining the extremities of a much larger form, which I sensed more than saw.

The twelve whisked across the floor.

“They are—or rather it is—a queen,” Wendigo said. “From what I’ve gathered, there’s one queen for every splinter. Splinterqueens, I call them.”

The swarm partially surrounded us now—but retained the brooding sense of oneness.

“She told you all this?”

“Her demons did, yes.” Wendigo tapped the side of her head. “I got a dose after our ship crashed. You got one after we hit your ship. It was a standard sporehead from our arsenal, but the Splinterqueen loaded it with her own demons. For the moment that’s how she speaks to us—via symbols woven by demons.”

“Take your word for it.”

Wendigo shrugged. “No need to.”

And suddenly I knew. It was like eavesdropping a topologist’s fever dream—only much stranger. The burst of Queen’s speech couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second, but its afterimages seemed to persist much longer, and I had the start of a migraine before it had ended. But like Wendigo had implied before, I sensed planning—that every thought was merely a step toward some distant goal, the way each statement in a mathematical proof implies some final QED.

Something big indeed.

“You deal with that shit?”

“My chimeric parts must filter a lot.”

“And she understands you?”

“We get by.”

“Good,” I said. “Then ask her about Yarrow.”

Wendigo nodded and closed both eyes, entering intense rapport with the Queen. What followed happened quickly: six of her components detached from the extended form and swarmed into the train we had just exited. A moment later they emerged with Yarrow, elevated on a loom formed from dozens of wasp manipulators.

“What happens now?”

“They’ll establish a physical connection to her neural demons,” Wendigo said. “So that they can map the damage.”

One of the six reared up and gently positioned its blunt, anvil-shaped “head” directly above Yarrow’s frost- mottled scalp. Then the wasp made eight nodding movements, so quickly that the motion was only a series of punctuated blurs. Looking down, I saw eight bloodless puncture marks on Yarrow’s head. Another wasp replaced the driller and repeated the procedure, executing its own blurlike nods. This time, glistening fibers trailed from Yarrow’s eight puncture points into the wasp, which looked as if it was sucking spaghetti from my compatriot’s skull.

Long minutes of silence followed, while I waited for some kind of report.

“It isn’t good,” Wendigo said eventually.

“Show me.”

And I got a jolt of Queen’s speech, feeling myself inside Yarrow’s hermetically sealed head, feeling the chill that had embraced her brain core, despite her pilot augs. I sensed the two intermingled looms of native and foreign demons, webbing the shattered matrix of her consciousness.

I also sensed—what? Doubt?

“She’s pretty far gone, Spirey.”

“Tell the Queen to do what she can.”

“Oh, she will. Now that she’s glimpsed Yarrow’s mind, she’ll do all she can not to lose it. Minds mean a lot to her—particularly in view of what the Splinterqueens have in mind for the future. But don’t expect miracles.”

“Why not? We seem to be standing in one.”

“Then you’re prepared to believe some of what I’ve said?”

“What it means,” I started to say—

But I didn’t finish the sentence. As I was speaking the whole chamber shook violently, almost dashing us off